Turbulence - Softcover

Chico Buarque

3.26

1,402 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747533571 ISBN 13: 9780747533573

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 1997

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The narrator of this tale is haunted by nostalgia for the places of his childhood set in a city that can only be Rio de Janeiro. A drop-out from the privileged world of luxury beach apartments and sybaritic obsessions, he has entered the 'other' Brazil of wretched poverty and petty crime.

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Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Portugese

From Publishers Weekly:

Heavy on angst and ennui, this bleak, semisurreal first novel elliptically evokes the moral malaise of a Brazil rife with class tensions and ready to explode. The nameless narrator, a dropout who lives on handouts from his chic, wealthy sister, steals her jewels, acquires a suitcase full of marijuana and gets mixed up with thieves and squatters on his family's ramshackle farm, now overrun by a shantytown gang. A bigger robbery, rape and murder ensue as events spin out of his control. Buarque, a Brazilian singer-songwriter, sprinkles his dark parable with jarring images of societal breakdown--a dead man sitting on a bus amid indifferent passengers, a well-dressed stranger carrying an artificial leg--but neither characters nor plot are absorbing enough to sustain the reader's interest. The protagonist's sister, disdainful ex-wife and distant mother are generic figures, nondescript furniture in a somnambulistic mindscape; the narrative constantly gets sidetracked in imagined future scenarios. Bush's smooth translation faithfully conveys the novel's volatile, hothouse atmosphere.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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